Is there such a thing as toilet karma? If so, I must have done something evil to a chamber pot in a past life.

The toilet at home is failing the flush properly at the moment. I won�t go into the gory details, but at least it�s not over-flowing. It�s also not that unusual given that the plumbing at our house is bad, and often made worse by tree roots. We do go through long periods of flushing toilets and drains that, well, drain, but we also have a regular supply of draino and the occasional desperate calling in the plumber. Usually on a long weekend. Last year it was Easter.

Most of the time it�s a case of �what can you do?� It�s a rental, and provided the landlord pays the plumber there�s not a whole hell of a lot else we can do about it that wouldn�t cause startling amounts of inconvenience. Of course, for all our landlord�s benefits (and they are many), he was the one who hired the plumber to re-plumb the place a number of years ago, before my time in the house, and cause all of these ongoing problems. And then insist until very recently that we continue to use the same plumber in emergencies. The name of the plumber, and I really, really am not making this up, is Ivan Crapper.

Although we no longer call Mr Crapper to help us out with our shit, we do keep his card on our fridge as a souvenir of his actual existence.

As I said, the plumbing at the house playing up isn�t such a big deal � I draino-ed the shower this morning and we did have ten people over to the house on Sunday and a hell of a lot of rain last week � but it was in arriving at work this morning that I began to question my toilet karma.

The toilets at work were known to play up a few years ago, but they were fixed and have been functioning perfectly for at least two years. But on entering one stall this morning I appears that, perhaps in some over enthusiastic cleaning(?) the entire seat has come off and is now sitting over the bowl attached to nothing. The entire seat and lid just sliding around.

So while the toilet is still technically functioning, the stall was to be avoided until the body corporate got the seat replaced. Not that big a deal, until just before lunch I go into the other stall to discover that we may have put the gruff �This is Out of Order Again!� sign - which had been taped to the back of the door for the last two years in case we needed it - away a little too early. Second toilet, not functioning at all. You can�t even press the button in. Oh, body corporate! We need your help again.

All of this leaves me wondering exactly what I did to that chamber pot or out-house, and hoping that these things really only come in threes and I won�t find the house flooded with sewerage when I get home this evening.

On the good news side of things � both from a toilet and non-toilet perspective � Betty got over the mild case of food poisoning being experienced yesterday, and perhaps it wasn�t food poisoning after all because none of the other 9 people at Sunday�s barbeque got sick. There�s nothing like the thought of poisoning your closest friends to cheer up your day, after all. Especially not when one of them is throwing up into your not-correctly-flushing toilet.